Family Recalls Concerns After Fatal Stabbing of Teenager

A bloody handprint stained the sidewalk on Lorimer Street in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just across from Sternberg Park, where Jovani Cubias sometimes played basketball, his family said, outclassing his friends on the court as he grew lankier. Other red blotches marked the spot where Jovani, 17, was fatally stabbed on Wednesday afternoon. He was attacked, the police said, following an argument with another male.

A day after Jovani’s death, his mother, Blanca Cubias, an immigrant from El Salvador who works as a cleaning woman, sat in largely mute disbelief on Jovani’s disheveled bed in his room in the family’s large apartment in East Flatbush. When she did speak, it was in hiccupping gasps. “My baby. My best baby!” said Ms. Cubias, 44. “My son has died! He’s no more.”

The police provided few details about the nature of the altercation other than to say the victim and his attacker knew each other. But as his family and friends gathered around the kitchen table at his home on Thursday, they described recent events in Jovani’s life that had worried them.

A few weeks ago, according to his sister, Lorena Juarez, 24, Jovani confided in his older brother that he was being harassed, followed home from school and besieged with threatening calls and text messages. All of it, the sister said, was a consequence of a fight involving Jovani’s girlfriend and another girl. Jovani, Ms. Juarez said, had a cellphone video of the fight that he showed his brother.

At about 1 a.m. on the day he was killed, Jovani’s girlfriend, whom he had dated for a year, came to the family’s apartment, said his mother, who declined to reveal the girl’s name. Jovani told his brother that he was going to fight the boyfriend of the girl in the cellphone video.

Jovani, his family said, was the sort of teenager whose fights took place only in the video games he loved or with his older brother, with whom he shared a bedroom and his treasured designer sneakers. Diana Sanchez, 30, who used to babysit Jovani, said it was a running joke that any brotherly tackles would elicit only giggles from Jovani, never retaliation. “He would just answer back with a smile,” she said.

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The sidewalk on Lorimer Street in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Jovani, a high school junior, was stabbed to death on Wednesday afternoon.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

Jovani barely slept the night before he died and then did not go to school, his mother said. When she chided him for staying home, he said he had something to do and would go to class later. Ms. Cubias said she received a call on Wednesday afternoon from the Green School, where Jovani was a junior, telling her that he had been stabbed. Frantic, she called the police. “They told me he was dead,” she said.

The police would not comment on the family’s version of events, citing the developing investigation. Just before Jovani was attacked, there was a fight between two people, both female, at the same location in East Williamsburg, according to the police. The assailant, described by the police only as male and Hispanic, approached Jovani and stabbed him in the chest. Following a 911 call, Jovani was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead.

A candle flickered on Thursday afternoon on the kitchen table at the family’s home, and the words “sleep in peace Jovani” were inscribed on it in black marker. Next to it was a photograph of Jovani as a little boy with deep brown eyes and ears poking out, wearing a powder-blue satin dress shirt. In the photograph, his older sister stands over him, an image that typified their relationship. With their mother consumed by her work cleaning offices, Ms. Juarez was Jovani’s caretaker from a young age.

“I was more like his mother than his sister,” she said. As he grew up, he strove to care for her in return. He loved baking, she said, and could often be found in their large kitchen with a bowl of batter and a whisk in hand, whipping up cookies, brownies or his signature dessert, devil’s food cake.

When she moved into her own apartment, Jovani made her weekly visits home an occasion, she said, heating frozen pizzas and mixing iced tea for her children. “He always wanted to make sure we were O.K.,” she said, “that he was warming us up.”

She had hoped Jovani would be the first person in the family to finish high school and had dreamed that he would go to college.

“Just one more year of school,” Ms. Juarez said. “They took that away from him.”